June Top Movers - Foxes and Tigers and Buzz… Oh my!
Written by Max Freiert (contact - e-mail) -- July 11th, 2008 | Recommend ThisOn the web, visitor traffic can ebb and flow more than the the Bay of Fundy tides and looking at how this traffic shifts over time provides a great snapshot of what is top-of-mind among consumers at any given point in time.
With the June data we released earlier this week, now is a great time to look reflect on the sites that experienced a tsunami of incoming traffic in our latest month of data. And while sites related to sports seem to dominate the list, other top movers demonstrate consumer interest in Mozilla’s download day, summer blockbusters, celebrity gossip and the U.S energy crisis. The table below shows the top 20 fastest moving sites in June based on total monthly visits.
- Tiger Pounces: With the US Open heading into a sudden death round in the middle of a work day, many tuned in online…much to the dismay of managers coast to coast.
- Fail-Whale makes waves: Plurk.com, a new microblogging site that compete’s with Twitter, may have seen a large boost in traffic due to near constant downtime Twitter experienced in June.
- Firefox rocks: “The home of Firefox Community Marketing”, spreadfirefox.com saw a huge lift in traffic with the release of Firefox 3, and Mozilla’s record breaking “Download day” initiative.
It’s interesting to drill down on whether these surges of visits came from gradually growing interest over the month, or some sort of event driven spike. The chart chart below shows the last 90 daily traffic for several of the sites in the top movers list. This traffic is measured by daily reach: the share of all US internet users who visited each site on a given day.
While applounge.com saw an immediate lift in traffic seems to be related to MySpace applications, large spikes in traffic at spreadfirefox.com and usopen.com surround the two underlying events that drove traffic. While it didn’t peak as high as traffic on usopen.com, Wimbledon.org saw consistent growth leading up to the finals, before a substantial drop in the first week of July.
Shameless pitch: All of this analysis (and more) can be done using Compete Pro metrics. Sign up for an account here.
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July 12th, 2008 at 7:39 am
Are these one-day events (or maybe a couple of days for Wimbledon) in any way significant to the ‘grand scheme of things’, as far as traffic flow is concerned? I mean, once its over, its over. Except for applounge, the rest seem to be tanking back to the ‘pre-event’ levels.
July 12th, 2008 at 8:22 am
Thanks for the great info. I hope you’ll follow this with some more great content.
July 14th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Ling - Great point! Many of these movers are basically event-driven, so they certainly don’t necessarily provide visibility into the more fundamental changes in web browsing behavior. If you run this same analysis over a running 3+ month period, you start to tease this ‘grand scheme of things’ out.
July 14th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
These companies that are growing so quickly must be doing something write. At one point can the traffic be explained by social “buzz” vs. them doing everything absolutely correct from a business perspective. I’m sure it a little bit of both. A good book that emphasizes how to attain such success, as witnessed in these high traffic growth companies is the “The Answer.”….www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2